The Intel:

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Seems right to me. Think in centuries and not your lifetime. Your lifetine is more likely to span two centuries, so while the 1950s was just recently, you’ll be in the 2050s.

There is growing speculation that Russia might be willing to halt its invasion along current front lines in return for significant concessions.

Well, obviously. If the US isn’t already in cahoots with Russia and are just that dumb, there’s a good chance they’ll continue being dumb by throwing them a much needed line.

Well I’m clearly not capable of your levels of communication and unfortunately haven’t been for some time.

I foolishly thought of people’s real world experiences to explain a reality, when all you wanted was validation of your claim by—I dunno—an ATM receipt, or something… As I said, I am struggling to communicate on this level. I am so daft, you see.

Have a W-shaped cookie. You got me!

Yes, I’m not sure why you think that wasn’t clear. Fills me with doubt that you grasped much else of my comment. Oh, well.

Assumptions will rarely end up in your favour.

You perhaps didn’t read they were teen backpackers? Of all the travellers in the world, find me a majority in the financial position to book all their accommodation with the confidence that no matter what, it’s going to be great because that’s the assurance of such a travel style and the price tag it comes with.

It’s not like you’re going to find the best deals online in a place with a hundred places to stay. Or maybe you can and that’s the irony of your assumption.

Apart from work trips, I can’t think of the last time I had accommodation all booked. I don’t really see the point of travelling if you don’t make plans after being there a while and getting to know good info from locals. A lot of the time locations or weather just sucks, so I keep on and adventure somewhere else instead. That’s kind of normal outside of resort holidaying.

Oh, I will. I’m getting along in years and am about to pick up split boarding for backcountry. I could learn to just ski, but I’ve lived life surfing and skating, so I picked up snowboarding real fast and been doing that a while now.

Kinda always been into the idea of towing with a snow mobile too, so maybe I can afford that around then haha

Don’t act your age. Get to a point where you’re so dismissive of your age you have to think hard about what your age actually is.

If I stopped and started doing things based on what I’m meant to do at an age, I’d be a miserable piece of shit. I just do and think what I want. When I’m 60, I’ll still be learning and doing what I want because I rejected the idea that I’m too old or too young for something.

Rather than setting sights on what you want to achieve, set sights on what you never want to become. The rest just flows around that and happiness is always there because you’ve identified what unhappiness is and stayed clear of it.

lol, and here’s me thinking I’ll get to finally loosen these bootstraps one day. Wouldn’t be Millennial difficulty if something nice happened for once, so why should I expect reprieve in retirement age? Probably just be anxious af anyway because not being abused by another generation seems too good to be true.

I’m non-US and work at a university. Some of the academics I can’t imagine surviving in the real world. The only way I can explain it is they get a PhD and then the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to everything, but they don’t evolve on it. And they’re weirdly incredibly gullable—like, in their 30s and vulnerable to scams and misinformation your grandma would immediately pick up on. You get concerned for what else they may be teaching students because kids fresh out of high school often trust adults and these adults put off an identity of being experts.

You want to say to them, “If it’s not about phylogenetics, don’t listen to a single fucking thing this person says no matter how confident they sound.”

I’m very familiar with the world of academia. To be honest, many of them/us are surprisingly stupid, but for a reason. To get a doctorate in a field is no easy task. Your lack of knowledge in much else is because you spent all you had being knowledgeable in a specific thing.

So even if you think a doctor is a stupid person in general, there is NO EXCUSE for them being stupid in the one thing they spent years becoming an expert in.

So, is this “doctor” actually holding a doctorate in this field? Let me check…

…god, he has the most generic name it’s impossible to know.

Yeah, so he’s heard the term, got upset by it, and sent it back out on others to upset them. Like when a tankie calls a tankie a tankie but neither of them are tankies, they just know from personal experience people don’t like being called a tankie so tankies are now anyone but them. Next thing you know, a mindless mob are calling things like public new media channels tankies grifters.

We can, but it’s a lot of effort and time. Good AI requires a lot of patience and specificity.

I’ve sort of accepted the gimmick of LLMs being a bit of a plateau in training. It has always been that we teach AI to learn, but currently the public has been exposed to what they perceive to be magic and that’s “good enough”. Like, being wrong so often due to bad information, bad interpretation of information, and bias within information is acceptable now, apparently. So teaching to learn isn’t a high mainstream priority compared to throwing in mass information instead—it’s far less exciting working on infrastructure.

But here’s the cool thing about AI, it’s pretty fucking easy to learn. If you have patience and creativity to put toward training, you can do what you want. Give it a crack! But always be working on refining it. I’m sure out there right now someone’s been inspired enough to do what you’re talking about and in a few years of tears and insane electricity bills, there’ll be a viable model.

Yeah, get too far in or give it too much to start with, it can’t handle it. You can see this with visual generators. “Where’s the lollypop in its hand? Try again… Okay now you forgot about the top hat.”

Have to treat them like simple interns that will do anything to please rather than admit the task is too complex or they’ve forgotten what they were meant to do.

I use Claude for SQL and PowerQuery whenever I brain fart.

There’s more usefulness in reading its explanation than its code, though. It’s like bouncing ideas back off someone except you’re the one that can actually code them. Never bother copying it’s code unless it’s a really basic request that’s quicker to type than to code.

Bad quality and mass quantity in is obviously much quicker for LLMs and people that don’t understand the tech behind AI don’t understand this actually what’s going on, so it’s “magic”. A GPT is fundamentally quite simple and produces simple results full of potential issues, combine that with poor training quality and “gross”. There’s minimal check iterations it can do and how would it even do them when it’s knowledge base is more bullshit than it is quality?

Truth is it will be years before AI can reliably code. Training for that requires building a large knowledge base of refined working solutions covering many scenarios, with explanation, to train off. It’d take longer for AI to self-learn these too without significant input from the trainer.

Right now you can prompt the same thing six times and hope it manages a valid solution in one. Or just code it yourself.

We’re slowly getting there. Unfortunately our ship is a large one to turn, but if you think about it, we’re quite quick lately. The combustion age seems like it’ll be over in about ql1/20th the time of the Bronze Age. But, yes, aware the Bronze Age didn’t actively destroy our liveable environment.

That’s my point. Grift isn’t the correct term to use for that argument. But he’s heard it, he’ll use it, then we’ll have a bunch more people roaming around saying anything is grifting.

And they do the news. How does one grift the news without immediately being fact checked and called out? I can’t fathom a possible scam or swindle scenario.

“Another exclusive, Tom. We learn chickens are telepathic so we’re going live to get the opinions on the egg crisis with resident telepath, Kim Donovan. But only if Congress approves more funding, so write in those letters.”

In these modern times, whether it news, day to day, or on here, I’m realising many American throw around terms with no idea of their fundamental meaning, just because they heard someone else using them.

It is so fucking confusing. And of course these are the kind of people that don’t like being told that they are making little sense, l failing to understand what a word means and the context in which to use it.

For example, both sides regularly call each other “the libs”. Then when you ask them what that is, you get two completely opposite concepts (obviously) of which both fundamentally oppose liberal thought, bar one or two specific of the many ideas.

It can only start from either a single misunderstanding or deliberate misinformation and then spreads like wildfire via types of media, because apparently many Americans hate taking a few seconds reading up on something prior to adopting it into their everyday outlook. The indoctrination is so easy and has been wildly successful.

So, watch more people adapt “grit” as a word, using it so out of context and so frequently, it may as well he “squanch.”

Now, now, the Laws of Hammurabi clearly state what to do here…

22 “If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

So you will note that punishment is only given out as the woman is harmed, as this is a life. Miscarriage shmishcarriage, it’s not a life yet so no harm done, no punishment given.

It’s an open and shut case, Your Honour. The husband can demand all he wants but no life was harmed here, no eyes, no teeth, the $250,000 cap applies as “the court allows”.